I read articles about various marketing methods that get people to spend more money. I have to laugh at those articles because those marketing ploys don’t work on my. I don’t follow the pattern they are saying consumers follow. This could be because I happened to be one of the rare women who hate to shop. I also just can’t believe that the masses are as completely gullible as that.

This image of the 99 cent menu is a little off as most of the items on the old 99 cents menu are now over a dollar but under two dollars.

I also disagree with the marketing concept that even a bad ad is okay because people will remember the product and not the ad. Years and years ago, Wendy’s had a marketing campaign that I hated. The more I saw it the more negative I felt about Wendy’s. I eventually forgot the series of ads that I thought were so bad, but every time I drove past a Wendy’s, I felt the same negative feelings and disgust. I didn’t go to a Wendy’s restaurant in about a decade. I think it was the spicy chicken sandwich that got me to go back.

I’ve stopped going again. The changes they made to make their food seem more like ‘real’ food were bad changes. I haven’t had a good serving of fries there in two years and the quality of some of the other stuff has been going downhill during that same time. So I just stopped altogether.

There are two marketing campaigns that have worked on me.

One came out when I was very young, so it didn’t affect my shopping habits but it probably explains why I was a Coke fan over Pepsi. Today, I go between both equally. But anytime they do a retro ad campaign (I know they did it sometime in the 1990’s as well as more recently), this one gets to me and I want Coke. It was the “I’d like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony” advertisements.

Pepsi copied this add campaign with a song that sounded very much like it. I thought they used the fund raising song, “We are the World”, but upon looking that up, it turns out that some people objected to “We are the World” because they thought it sounded too much like a Pepsi jingle. I guess the jingle came first and the song came later.

I was sure Jeremy Piven had done a remake of this commercial in the 1990’s but I can’t find a reference of it anywhere.

But the best marketing campaign ever is also from the 70’s. They wrote a jingle and hired an actor who could sing and dance to perform in the commercial, An American Werewolf in London’s David Naughton. This good looking, young actor danced around signing a song that still gets stuck in my head several decades later. “Wouldn’t you like to be a pepper too, Dr. Pepper, drink Dr. Pepper.” I will admit that I usually see a later version of this commercial with a shorter, more muscled, actor with short hair. I thought it was Jeremy Piven, before he did the 1998 TV show, Cupid. My research seems to indicate I am wrong.

To this day, when I see the red cans w/ the Dr. Pepper logo, that song starts to filter through my brain and I start to crave a Dr. Pepper. A few days back, I saw a Facebook post for Dr. Pepper asking, “When was the last time you drank one?” The song started to play in my brain as I thought to myself that I didn’t know when. The past three mornings, I’ve gone straight to the machines at work and started my day with a bottle of Dr. Pepper.